Ghostly black-and-white images of stars and planets, culled by the artist Rosa Barba, appeared while recorded voices emerged from loudspeakers, some of them musing on astronomy, some discussing philosophy. The conversational patchwork moved from parsecs to Italo Calvino.

Encompassing units of astronomical measurement and Italian literature is just the kind of thing that this enormous building was created for. The Priem Center, known as Empac, opened in 2008 with a mission to explore the blurring boundary between the arts and sciences — both, after all, engaged in the work of experimentation and the examination of perception.

To that end Empac’s four performance spaces were equipped with an impressive range of multimedia and technical capacities. Led by its director, Johannes Goebel, the center’s curators have attracted artists eager for the time and resources to do work that might raise eyebrows elsewhere.

Some of the programming has been idiosyncratic but low-tech — Michael Gordon rehearsed and recorded his bassoon septet “Rushes”; Laurie Anderson led an onstage tai chi class — and some has been more overtly cutting edge. Dancers have traced their movements with a 3-D laser scanner. Mr. Goebel has been part of a collaborative project focused on data visualization and virtual reality. The composer Pauline Oliveros, a professor at the school, has worked with others on developing an artificial-intelligence musician able to perform (and improvise!) alongside a human ensemble.

“Interzone” (2003-4), a multimedia acoustic-electric work by the German composer Enno Poppe, which the Talea Ensemble was originally supposed to perform on Friday, would have fit in well here, with the players on a custom-built stage in the center of the 1,200-seat concert hall, surrounded by the audience and projection screens. But visa issues forced the group to substitute it with Mr. Poppe’s “Speicher” (2008-13), conducted by James Baker, in its American premiere.

Entirely acoustic — the sound booth, often a site of intense activity at an Empac concert, sat empty and forlorn — the 70-minute “Speicher” is really an assemblage of six pieces, played without pause. Mr. Goebel is obsessive about acoustics and eliminating ambient noise in Empac’s halls, and one of Mr. Poppe’s recurring motifs, a soft, sighing droop, registered with preternatural clarity and presence, even if just a single musician was playing it.

Slithering, unsteady passages roused themselves into raucous celebrations, handled with Talea’s characteristic polish and vitality. Mr. Poppe has a gift for imaginative orchestration: Rarely has an accordion’s wheeze taken on such organlike nobility, or a celesta sounded so pearly against piercing winds.

The audience numbered about 70, roughly 6 percent of capacity and low enough to give most artistic directors panic attacks. (Other similarly challenging concerts here have done significantly better.) But Mr. Goebel, cushioned by sources of revenue other than customers, radiates blissful indifference to such matters.

As universities become, more and more, the American institutions best equipped to fund artmaking, Empac’s thoroughly academic approach may become more common, valuing exploration and incremental advancement of the field as ends in themselves. The Talea Ensemble was given an uninterrupted week in the space, a rare opportunity to study and percolate. If just a few dozen people showed up for the final product, should it matter?

Well, maybe. While Mr. Goebel cares little about ticket sales per se, he wants to entice more students. The few who showed up to “Speicher” might well have been turned off by the hall’s lighting, which was kept throughout the concert at a presumably intentional full blast, creating an almost extravagantly uncomfortable listening environment. Without a preconcert talk, on-stage discussion or extensive notes, the evening, for better or worse, emphasized immersion over education.

“It was a stretch for many people here,” the physicist Shirley Ann Jackson, the school’s president since 1999 and the visionary behind Empac, said of the center’s inception in an interview in her office overlooking downtown Troy. But she said the board, faculty and students had embraced it, and initiatives aimed at fostering more interdisciplinary research projects are included in the strategy that will culminate in 2024, the school’s bicentennial.

Financial difficulties remain: Empac’s budget has suffered from schoolwide cuts and a hiring freeze has stalled the process of appointing a new curator of theater and dance. But its resources remain formidable and its goal — creating a space for people to expand their range of experience — is inspiring. There’s even something refreshing about Mr. Goebel’s distaste for easy, Facebook-style approval. Asked if he wanted people to like the work he presented, he replied, with a smile: “Liking is such a feeble thing.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C4 of the New York edition with the headline: Shrugging Popularity to Promote Creative Liberty. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe